Be a Good Reader to Become a Better Writer

                                                           
 Let me begin with a memorable quote by William Faulkner.

'Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.'

Nothing can more aptly describe the significance of reading for a writer.

And it doesn't matter what you read.

Be hungry and devour everything that comes your way.

Novels, short stories, novellas, poems, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, descriptions on your toothpaste wrapper, instructions on how to use an insecticide, grocery list and what not.

What is important is that you read and learn:

what people write and how.

You would realize that it all starts with an idea.

And the idea may center on a person, an incident, a place, an experience or may travel to your past or future.

In short, it can be anything that catches your attention or invokes a sudden reaction in you and convinces you that it is worth sharing:

• Someone’s mysterious eyes 
• Torn clothes of a beggar 
• A long cue in front of a bank 
• Birth of a girl in the family 
• Suicide committed by a farmer 
• A soldier's heroic deed in the face of danger 
• A child's desire to befriend Santa Claus 

The list can be endless but it always augurs well for a budding writer to start with something that he has experienced firsthand. This is what renders his writing credible.

For more insights on credibility, see my post:

Your Story Your Style!

You will also become aware of how an idea is treated as every writer has his own style but we would leave this discussion on style to a later date.

However, please don’t be in a hurry to put your thoughts to paper the moment you come across a worthy idea. Allow the idea to live with you for some time wherein, like a sculptor, you can continue to work on the raw material with your chisel, rejecting some parts, accepting a few and at the end, turning the rock into a beautiful piece of art. This kind of gestation inside the deepest recesses of your mind will internalize the initial spark, make it personal and intimate and, most important, turn it authentic.

At this stage, the idea becomes ripe, can no longer be confined and finally breaks free, resulting in the birth of a story or assume any other creative form.

Moreover, life does not offer you a new theme every day. If it does, you have hit a jackpot. Mostly, it is the same cycle of birth and death, joys and sorrows. But the good thing is that the variations of this repetitive cycle are infinite.

So, the challenge you face is to give a fresh treatment to old themes and turn them into gold every time.

Another relevant point in this context is that it is your faculty of observation that enables you to note minutest possible details about the world around you. The aim here is to catch an object or experience in its full vitality invoking the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch wherever possible. Hence, next time you see a rose, apart from describing its outer beauty, pitch in a word about its fragrance and softness too.

And as you mature as an author, your power of imagination empowers you to create a real or may be a fancy world which we know doesn't exist but still believe it does.

This is the awesome effect that you as a writer can create on your readers. You can cast a magic spell which enthralls them on one hand and generates a gratifying reading experience on the other.

And this happens because the writer in you has unearthed the benefits of reading and decides to read, read and read so that he learns what people write and how.

This, in addition to your own power of observation and imagination, liberates you to select your own themes and develop your own style.

And believe me ladies and gentlemen, reading the great masters like Tolstoy and Tagore is akin to tasting the wine of life directly from the source - an experience so strong that it transforms you as a human being first and as a writer later.

***

A Thriller of a Short Story

Lovers Point